As far as I see it, it’s a request: you can choose to follow it or not, and if you choose not to follow it, we can show you the door.
Since there’s a separate thread going about the PM issue perhaps we should continue it over there, and leave this for any further issues related to Seven.
Fair enough and you might not have gotten to it yet, but I’d appreciate confirmation that I wasn’t just mod-noted/warned/thin-iced.
PS: DrDeth- 
No more than you can see that he won’t change.
I was making a comparison and nothing else. All my notes and warnings have official wording to make it clear.
I know. I was agreeing with you. Pretty cool, eh?
I’m just so […sniff…] not used to it.
All over the place? You have examples of posters calling other posters “asshole” “all over the place” in GD?
But, if mods are demanding leeway to enforce that rule, sorry, “request”, shouldn’t you be responsible about it?
My problem here is that whatever seven did that’s such a terrible crime hasn’t been satisfactorily explained. He mocked a mod by quoting one of her PM’s? Gee! That shouldn’t even deservea warning, and if it did, the warning should go both ways. He complained a lot about the board’s organization? Well, why is that a wrong thing to do, in the first place? This is not a ship in war time, nobody will die if “the authority” is questioned.
It all looks like a personal grudge from a mod to me.
Maybe he will, but it’s very doubtful in such a short time. Have you actually gone over the kind of stuff he’s been posting for the last few months?
Thee was quite a it of other stuff- you need to read the other threads.
No, I don’t need to read the other threads. You can tell me. Or a mod. I mean, this is what this whole thread is about, isn’t it? I would like to think that the whole banning was not a capricious act, that there was some thought behind it, not some gut feeling. therefore explaining why seven was harming the board in any way should be the easiest thing to do, right?
If being an asshole was not Seven’s usual M.O., maybe he has depression. That will certainly change someone’s personality.
I think we had been told to assume that if there was no announcement about a banning, the exiled Doper was a sock.
I think the thread announcing his ban makes it pretty clear what the issue is. I posted two warnings and discussed the constant recreational complaining and attacking, the snarkpit posts and the signature, which I read as a confirmation “hey, I’m trolling and here to complain!” rather than a shocking invasion of TubaDiva’s privacy.
I think this has already been dealt with in enough depth.
Marley, FTR and with no real dog in this fight. I think that this is one of those things that the more you explain it, the more confusing it gets. Sadly, you don’t (shouldn’t have, at least) the option of just walking out of it as it then looks as you are hiding from it and/or conceding.
It is my opinion that if it is true that in the recent past all of Seven’s posts were “Recreational Complaining” (I haven’t checked myself), then yeah, he was being a jerk and he should have been suspended/banned for it. That’s all you need. All the bull about the sig, all individual examples are just hooks for the rules lawyers to pull you down into a losing discussion of what’s what.
This is where you (collective you) need to be a dick and just repeat the party line (“we decided he was being a jerk” or “we figured his contribution to the board was not worth the hassle of his whining” or whatever) without falling into details.
Less is more. In Moderation being laconic and one tracked is the winning ticket.
It might look like you are banning people “because we can”, but well, in the end and without it being an admission of mad power gone to the head, that is basically what it all boils down to.
The customer is always right. The administration has the right to refuse service. Two sides of the coin. We will bend over backwards to please you until we decide it is no longer in our interest to do so.
You run the risk of going overboard with it, of course, but that’s where the art of Moderation lies. In maintaining a healthy level of disturbance that keeps the place moving and interesting without either settling into oneness or getting muddied.
People are free to not like your chosen level of disturbance and go elsewhere, of course. This is where consistency helps (and where this place limps the worst, IMO). If you set one level, alienate a bunch and keep another, then changing that level will alienate the bunch you kept without guaranteeing the return of the ones that left before. Then you lose numbers.
Maybe all you need is a longer time frame to make decisions. When someone spots a potential problem, give the warning, gather the crew and discuss it. If it takes a week from offense to banning, then so be it. What can a person do in that week? He can gather no public outrage if he hasn’t been banned. Plus he has been warned that the council is in meeting. Then you can see if this knowledge spurs him to being more of a jerk or if he corrects course, giving you a gauge to his intentions and disposition.
Anyways, I am rambling now. Choose the two cents you want and keep the change too. Hah.
Apologies. I was reading both the Talk With Dead People thread wherein lekatt is spewing about something or other and a couple of Pit threads and got the two mixed up. Just now realized that.
Now it’s time for some coffee.
re your second sentence: Yes, I have and the actual number of threads was quite small. If picking on Liberal, mostly in Pit threads IIRC is now a way to get yourself on the road to bannination, then there’s a lot of other people who better start watching what they type. There have been complaints about the board leadership for the past 10 years. I can say this as I used to lurk and read the AOL board and finally joined here in 2000. There have always been very vocal criticizers of TPPB here but I can’t recall any body who actually got banned because of it.
Even Melin was banned, not for some bullshit in her sig but because she made a threat to sue.
Fine. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that “recreational complaining” is such a horrible thing to do. Could you, please, put some examples here of seven doing that?
As I posted over the weekend, if you read his posts over the last several months, you’ll find virtually nothing except complaints about moderation and attacks on one other poster. If things are that awful here one wonders why he stuck around.
Or worse. If he were misdiagnosed as depressed, and given the medication normally given to depressed patients (some form of seratonin uptake inhibitor) he could have flipped out entirely. I know this for a fact. Been there. Done that. Bought the tee shirt. I would recommend seeing a competent psychiatrist who can make a proper diagnosis, rather than relying on the diagnosis of a GP or internist, if in fact that’s what he did.
There are an awful lot of people who love the Dope, who’ve been here for almost a decade, and for whom the Dope is a part of their lives, who are sitting back and shaking their heads at the sheer abundance of mismanagement and official stupidity that have been a near-constant occurrence since Zotti decided to come down from his editorial heaven and dispense his wisdom directly. There have been some absolutely stupendously idiotic judgment calls by mods and admins alike. There have been “innovations” that have flopped like a mattress discarded in the back alley of a whorehouse. There has been what looks an awful lot like capricious modding and a couple of capricious bannings.
And some of us, who have spent nine or ten years helping to make this place as good as it used to be, can’t stand to watch it spiral downward. But it’s not a democracy, is it? It’s Ed’s personal fief, granted by the business failures that were the Chicago Reader and are now Creative Loathing. All we can do is be gadflies about what we see as wrong, buzzing around and biting where we think it will do the most good.
Yes…it’s gotten to the point where the poster/admin relationship has turned icy. You know that’s not OUR fault, right? Most of us who are doing the biting have been members in good standing for, again, a decade, more or less.